By Daan de Wit
The Dutch in this article has been translated into Enlish by Idde Lijnse.

AlterNet, a website that claims to provide critical journalism, writes: 'Many feel that the 2004 election will be the most important one of their lifetime. The two main parties hold starkly different visions. AlterNet's goal is to provide special coverage of efforts to bring more people into the democratic process, as well as hold the media accountable for their coverage of the campaign and the election.' How naive can you be? We read this introduction shortly after the reports of the success of Democratic Senator John Kerry in the Iowa caucuses on January 19th. 'Starkly different visions'? If Kerry continues like this we will have two members of the secret society Skull & Bones opposing each other. Don't think there will be much left of the 'democratic process' then.

Yesterday, Nu.nl wrote: 'If elections were held now in the United States and John Kerry were the Democratic candidate, he would triumph over George Bush. This is shown by an opinion poll in the Saturday edition of Newsweek magazine. Kerry would get 49 percent of the votes now, against 46 for Bush. [...] Furthermore, the Newsweek poll showed that American voters believe that no Democratic candidate will be able to beat Bush in the national elections. While 52 percent of those asked want to get rid of Bush, more than 78 percent think that the current president will get a second term.' So that 52% does not seem to have much confidence in the 'democratic process'. DaanSpeak is in their camp because of the following reasons:

Cheating could still keep Bush firmly fixed in the saddle
In random order:

- For his re-election, Bush is able to spend an amount of money which exceeds many times that of his opponents.

- Bush could pull a fast one - for example a positive one by arresting Bin Laden or a negative one by way of a second September eleventh. DaanSpeak has written about this previously, though a lot of people will find this idea too farfetched. The famous New York Times columnistWilliam Safire, however, does not find this idea farfetched. 'In a column published December 31, New York Times columnist William Safire blandlypredicts that the "'October surprise' affecting our [2004] election" will be "a major terror attack in the US." This ominous prognostication is given in passing as one of 16 predictions about the new year, in a piece carrying the semi-jocular headline, "Office Pool, 2004." Safire, Richard Nixon's former speechwriter and political aide, and a consummate Washington insider, neither explains nor elaborates on his prediction, and gives no sources. But the off-hand manner in which he posits a major attack on US soil "affecting" the presidential election suggests he is merely echoing a common theme of discussions in the corridors of power of the American capital', writes the World Socialist Web Site.
The October Surprise to which Safire refers was the successful secret operation led by the father of the current American president, which caused Carter to lose the 1980 presidential election to Reagan. One of the strategies at the time was to have the American hostages kidnapped in Teheran for a longer period. (Read more about it in this article I wrote some time ago). So W. Bush's second October Surprise would certainly not come out of the blue.

- Besides foiling his opposition (read the story* of a member of the American Green Party who gets the McCarthy treatment) he could of course steal the elections for a second time. This talent is also something that most likely runs in the family. *Thanks to the reader who sent us this story. Update: Another reader made us aware of the fact that the link was not working. The reason for this is that the story has been withdrawn at the request of the American Green Party. The Green Party reported to DeepJournal on January 29th that the story was not true and had been made public by a member of the Green Party who suffered 'mental problems'. So this man apparently has not been obstructed.

The first President Bush may have stolen an election as wellIn chapter 23 of George Bush - The Unauthorized Biography, Webster Tarpley writes about the previous president Bush: 'Bush also extended largesse to those who had assisted him in the [1988] election campaign just concluded. At the top of this list was Governor John Sununu of New Hampshire, who would have qualified as the modern Nostradamus for his exact prediction of Bush's 9% margin of victory over Dole in the New Hampshire primary --unless he had helped to arrange it with vote fraud.' 'The Sununu machine deliverd exactly as promised, securing the governor the post of White House chief of staff', writes Tarpley.
'[...] we now have modems installed in a goodly number of voting machines. People have observed voting machine company employees re-booting a voting machine by merely dialing a number on a cell phone. [...] There is a story in the book "Votescam," by James and Kenneth Collier, relating how George H. W. Bush, during the 1988 Presidential Primary season, lost to Bob Dole in the Iowa caucuses and was behind 8 percentage points in the New Hampshire Primary in the week before the voting. He made a telephone call to computer expert and Governor John [Sununu], and - lo and behold - when the polls closed on primary night the pollsters were dumbfounded. Bush won by 9 percentage points', writes Online Journal.

Bush accused of 'sleazy tricks' and possible voting fraudIn New Hampshire in 1988, candidate Pat Robertson ended up with the lowest vote tally. Just two weeks prior to a subsequent primary in heavily-Christian South Carolina, the Jimmy Swaggart sex scandal broke out. Jimmy Swaggart was a fellow TV-evangelist of Robertson's, and the public still had libertineTV-evangelist Jim Bakker on their minds. 'Talking to reporters, Robertson pointed to "the evidence that two weeks before the primary... it suddenly comes to light." Robertson added that the Bush campaign was prone to "sleazy" tricks, and suggested that his own last-place finish in New Hampshire was "quite possibly" the result of "dirty tricks" by the Bush campaign.'

William Loeb suspects Bush of vote fraudThis was not the first time that Bush was suspected of vote fraud in the primaries. In 1980, Bush ran against Reagan and others for the position of Conservative presidential candidate in Iowa and other primaries. ('In 1980 he [Bush] sought the Republican National Nomination but became Reagan's running mate instead', writes Political Library). The late William Loeb, publisher of The Union Leader, was pro-Reagan and against all of his opponents, including Bush. Tarpley in chapter 16: 'A February editorial by Loeb reacted to Bush's Iowa success with these warnings of vote fraud: The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert operation.... Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [included] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a six per cent bulge over Reagan... Will the elite nominate their man, or will we nominate Reagan?' In any case Bush's campaign was a remarkable one: 'According to one estimate, at least 25 former intelligence officials worked directly for the Bush campaign. As Bill Peterson of the Washington Post wrote on March 1, 1980, "Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory--perhaps ever--has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA Director George Bush."'

CIA still interested in voting process
Online Journal writes in a Special Report: '[...] on August 6th Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) gave a contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to review the Diebold Election System's software in preparation for elections in Maryland.' Diebold is a company that produces voting machines and we will be writing a lot more about it in the future (articles in preparation). For now, we can say that this company makes voting machines that are very susceptible to fraud; see also this humourous Shockwave-animation. So the Diebold software is being checked by SAIC, by order of Republican Governor Ehrlich.

Online Journal reports that SAIC maintained close relations with the American intelligence community: 'Former president, chief operating officer, and vice chairman of SAIC is Admiral Bill Owens, who is now Chairman of the Board for VoteHere. Owens also served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was a senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank Carlucci and Dick Cheney. [...] Another former SAIC board member, also on the board of VoteHere, is ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, a veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal. VoteHere is already benefiting from the Diebold debacle, as it will be partnering with Sequoia Voting Systems.' Sequoia is as dangerous a voting machine producer as Diebold, see also this DeepJournal. Online Journal cites the Orange County Weekly: '"Currently on SAIC's board is ex-CIA Director Bobby Ray Inman, director of the National Security Agency, deputy d irector of the CIA, and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency."' Other associate directors of SAIC were former CIA director John Deutch en 'William J. Perry [...] former Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration'.

More shadowy cooperative relationshipsOnline Journal goes on to write that Diversified Dynamics (owned by weapons producer Northrop Grumman) proudly states that SAIC assisted them in 'designing the world's most advanced electronic vote recording and election management system', which in its turn bought a company named Network Solutions Inc (NSI), the company that manages the domain names on the internet: 'SAIC is perhaps most notorious among Internet aficionados for buying the company, Network Solutions Inc (NSI), which received the no-bid, no-compete monopoly contract to privatize the government agency which registered domain names.' SAIC is a diverse company: 'Recently, SAIC got the contract to assist other corporations, including Northrop Grumman, in training of the Iraqi Army. [...] SAIC proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients. DARPA is the controversial Department of Defense (DOD) subsidiary [...]'.

'Meanwhile SAIC is a piece of work all by itself. "The federal government, its main customer, often doesn't want the public to know what the company [SAIC] is doing and, as one of the nation's largest employee-owned corporations, it escapes investor scrutiny," writes AP correspondent Elliot Spagat, in a July 26, 2003, article.' Meanwhile SAIC is also under fire in a different way: 'The Los Angeles Times cites government officials declaring Science Applications (SAIC) guilty of the "largest environmental fraud ... we've had here" and an example of "corporate greed."'

Electronic voting was also unsafe during Schwarzenegger's recall
Also recently, during the recall election in California, the machines were susceptible to fraud as was discovered by Wired, which has the results of a training session with the electronic voting machines: 'Voting-machine experts say the lapses could allow a poll worker or an outsider to change votes in machines without being detected. And because other problems inherent in the software won't be fixed before the recall, experts say sophisticated intruders can intercept and change vote tallies as officials transmit them electronically.' One doesn't hear Schwarzenegger, Rothschild or Buffett complain. 'David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University and critic of electronic voting machines that don't provide a verifiable paper trail, calls the information about the county's security "jaw-dropping."' Please read the full Wired article, because it is chock-full of remarkable examples of how things are - but shouldn't be. See also the evote-archive of Wired which is full of articles about the subject.

Verification of votes not possible in 49 out of 50 states
Jim Condit Jr. of Citizens for a Fair Vote Count (with the website VoteFraud) writes 'that over 3000 county Election boards and 49 Secretaries of State had made it effectively illegal for citizens in 49 states, [except New Hampshire], to check or double-check their ballots on election day, ready to go so far as to use police power to prevent the citizens from getting to their ballots for the purpose of counting them on election day'. Condit cites Stalin (the jury is still out as to whether or not Stalin actually said this): 'Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything'.

On the interests of the parties involved in the Syrian conflict and the role of the media

In the event of major military conflicts that risk considerable humanitarian and economic consequences, it is useful to examine the interests of all parties involved as well as the role that the media plays in reporting the events.

On the surface it’s straightforward: the U.S. wants to liberate Syria from a brutal dictator who is attacking his own people with poison gas. But beneath the surface there is something very different going on.